The real fruits of Adams’s “posthumous” life are his books; above all, “The Education,” “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres,” and a short, little-read volume called “A Letter to American Teachers of History.” He seemed to grasp that literary power, unlike that of Presidencies and political parties, had a chance to outlast its moment. In “The Education,” he describes the elusive work of deciding which artifacts of the past matter: a “cane-bottomed chair” is prized at auction long after its historical context has passed; meanwhile, we pay pennies for the “philosophy and science” of a bygone era.
His writing in these late works is designed to hold its value, even once the world he observed has expired. In old age, Adams conducted himself with the shocked air of someone who had returned from a sojourn into the future. In Chicago, in 1893, and in Paris, in 1900, he attended World Expositions of the new century’s technology. The historian in him detected in the huge, silent machines on display “a rupture in historical sequence.”Adams, according to Brown, “could appreciate Chicago’s flux because he felt it in himself.” Seeing the “chaos” of his mind reflected in the world changed him. The word “ecstasy” comes from the Greek ekstasis—to stand outside oneself. Adams experienced, in his later years, a period of wonder that, on the page, is ecstatic, psychedelic.
“The Education” begins as Louis Seize and ends as steampunk. Near its conclusion, Adams beholds the hall of dynamos at the Paris Exposition of 1900. “As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines,” Adams writes, “he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force”:
In these seven years man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale.
One “instrument” that did pick up those signals from the future was Adams’s prose. And so we have, in his book, the eerie double exposure of a person from the distant past almost stepping on our toes as he describes the technological future. “After so many years of effort to find one’s drift,” Adams writes, “the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back, with a steady progress oceanwards.” When I read the last chapters of the book, I always think of another great work that ends with a delegate of historical time gazing at his own obsolescence: Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Henry Adams, who considered himself “a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” who washed ashore in the twentieth, knew that he’d glimpsed our world. ♦